# Moss Creek Golf Club North Course vs. Port Royal Golf Club Robber's Row: The Hilton Head Island Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/moss-creek-golf-club-north-course-vs-port-royal-golf-club-robbers-row/

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Course Comparisons / South Carolina


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hilton Head Island runs on Lowcountry golf, live oaks and marsh on one side of the tee and a resort itinerary on the other. This comparison captures the island's split personality in two courses. Moss Creek's North Course is private, a Tom Fazio design from 1978 inside a 36 hole members' club, known locally by a name that tells you how it plays: Devil's Elbow. Port Royal's Robber's Row is resort golf, open to visitors, built by George Cobb in 1976 and redesigned by Pete Dye, routed near the Port Royal Sound ground where Civil War earthworks still mark the island's north end. One course you need a member for. The other you can book. That difference shapes everything else.

## Moss Creek North: short, tight, and proud of it

The North Course measures just 6,510 yards at par 72, with a 72.3 rating and a 134 slope from the championship tees. A 134 slope at 6,510 yards is a confession and a boast in the same number. The course defends itself without length. Local descriptions call it a shot maker's course, short and tight, with elevated greens surrounded by water or the property's signature trees. Elevated greens change the whole bargain. A tight course with flat greens lets you run the ball in and forgive a mediocre iron. Elevated greens surrounded by water ask for flighted, precise approaches all afternoon, and a miss is not a chip, it is a recovery.

Fazio built it in 1978 as the second championship course at Moss Creek, early work from an architect who would spend the next four decades building longer and plusher things. There is an argument the younger Fazio, working with less land and less budget, made the more honest golf course. John Fought updated the North Course in a renovation running from March to August 2025, which matters for a 1978 layout: the club is investing in keeping this test current rather than letting it become a period piece. Members and guests only, though. That access fact is the North Course's biggest weakness in any public comparison, and no amount of design praise changes it.

## Robber's Row: Cobb's bones, Dye's teeth

Robber's Row plays a little longer, par 72 at 6,657 yards, a 73.3 rating and the same 134 slope, and its history runs in layers. George Cobb laid out the original in 1976, and Pete Dye's redesign work put his fingerprints all over the scoring. Dye added or redesigned 43 bunkers on the front nine alone and leveled the course to par 36 on each side. Forty three bunkers on nine holes is not decoration. It is Dye telling you the front nine will be won or lost from the sand and the angles it protects.

The setting gives Robber's Row something Moss Creek cannot match for a visitor. The course plays near the historic Civil War earthworks by Port Royal Sound, so the round carries a sense of place beyond golf, marsh and history in the same walk. And it is resort access, which on Hilton Head is the difference between reading about a course and playing it. Place both in the island picture with [our Hilton Head Island ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hilton-head-island-sc/) and the state picture in [the full South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/).

## The verdict

On pure golf, the North Course wins for the player who can actually get on it. Short and tight with elevated greens is a harder daily test than its yardage suggests, and the Devil's Elbow nickname was earned by members who have played it for years, which is the criticism that counts. On the day, and on access, Robber's Row wins for everyone else, and everyone else is most golfers: a bookable tee time, a Dye bunkered front nine, a higher rating at a touch more length, and ground with real history under it.

So the honest verdict has two doors. If you have the member connection, play Moss Creek North and bring your iron game. If you are visiting the island like a normal human, Robber's Row is not the consolation prize. It is the better trip, and its front nine bunkering will test you plenty. The concession to the loser is easy to make: a private course that stays this demanding at 6,510 yards, nearly fifty years after Fazio drew it, deserves its reputation. It just guards that reputation behind a gate most golfers will never pass.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.